Right Opinion

Pop-Tart Terrorist

Rodney Francis is insufficiently ambitious. The pastor of the Washington Tabernacle Baptist Church in St. Louis has entered the fray over guns, violence and humanity's fallen nature with a plan for a "buyback" of children's toy guns. And toy swords and other make-believe weapons. There is, however, a loophole in the pastor's panacea. He neglects the problem of ominously nibbled and menacingly brandished breakfast pastries.

What Obama Is Doing to the Job Market

Firms are awash with cash, but they're not hiring. What's going on? One place to look for an explanation is the policies of the Obama administration. President Obama's proposal to increase the minimum wage and the health insurance employer mandate are combining to destroy job opportunities for young, unskilled workers in cities and towns across the country. The minimum wage, currently set at $7.25 an hour, will jump to $9 an hour and be indexed going forward if the president gets his way. The Affordable Care Act (ObamaCare) is already the law of the land and its effects are being felt right now, even though the employer mandate doesn't go into effect until next January.

From The Comedy Store

Kenya's government called its first election in six years Sunday, prompting President Obama's half-brother to announce he's running for office. He was born in Kenya and had never held office before. The half-brother, on the other hand, has some actual experience.

Scratch a Liberal, Find a Racist

By this time, most people are aware that, according to those on the Left, the only racists in America are white conservatives. In much the same way, they dismiss the likes of Thomas Sowell, Ward Connerly, Condoleezza Rice, Walter Williams, Larry Elder, Shelby Steele, Allen West and Dr. Ben Carson, as inauthentic blacks. In other words, the Left is so befuddled by reality that they ignore pigmentation in favor of politics.

Rand Paul Fights for Conservative Principles -- and Wins

Senator's brave filibuster wins public opinion and forces Obama into a corner.

Rotten to the Core: The Feds' Invasive Student Tracking Database

While many Americans worry about government drones in the sky spying on our private lives, Washington meddlers are already on the ground and in our schools gathering intimate data on children and families. Say goodbye to your children's privacy. Say hello to an unprecedented nationwide student tracking system, whose data will apparently be sold by government officials to the highest bidders. It's yet another encroachment of centralized education bureaucrats on local control and parental rights under the banner of "Common Core." As the American Principles Project, a conservative education think tank, reported last year, Common Core's technological project is "merely one part of a much broader plan by the federal government to track individuals from birth through their participation in the workforce." The 2009 porkulus package included a "State Fiscal Stabilization Fund" to bribe states into constructing "longitudinal data systems (LDS) to collect data on public-school students."

If We've Lost Walter ...

America Held Hostage: Sequester Day 8

Reassuring Words

WASHINGTON -- In my New York Times best-seller "Heroes Proved," the president of the United States orders the execution of an American citizen in the United States by using precision munitions fired from a remotely piloted aircraft, or RPA -- incorrectly referred to by our media as a drone. When the book came out last year, some critics derided the idea of a U.S. president's issuing an executive order to kill Americans in our homeland as "over the top" and "unthinkable." One even said the idea was "unfathomable." But thanks to Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., we now know the Obama administration already has contemplated such action. That ought to be troubling to every one of us. On March 6, Paul took to the floor of the U.S. Senate in a 13-hour effort to block the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director until the administration handed over its "legal, procedural and constitutional justification" for such "extrajudicial executions." The filibuster failed, and the Senate confirmed Brennan the following day. But the issues of constitutional protections for American citizens and the limits of executive power aren't going away. Nor should they.

ABC's Porn Pinup for Teenage Girls

Sometimes it's hard to measure the distance between the supposedly established, respectable press and the seediest corners of hardcore pornography. On March 1, ABC's "Nightline" celebrated a porn star named "James Deen" (real name: Bryan Sevilla). The apparent "news" hook is his role in a forthcoming movie with the ever-more pathetic Lindsay Lohan. ABC reporter Cecilia Vega sold Deen as a 27-year-old hazard to teenaged girls. They're boasting that he's found a new frontier of porn consumers, "some of them so young we couldn't even interview them on camera. Their parents had no idea that secretly they have a crush on a porn star. It is a phenomenon that not even the man at the center of it fully understands, but it's one that he fully defends." Insert ooooh-ahhhh track here. Nothing sells like sensationalistic sex. Just call it "news" -- and hide the smirk.

Conservatives and Citizenship

Jeb Bush's recent backtracking on the question of whether we should grant legal residency but withhold citizenship to the 11 million illegal immigrants living in the country today is far less Draconian than some advocates for legalization are claiming. It is an idea that has been floated by others who support legalization, including scholar Peter Skerry of Boston College. As Skerry points out in a recent article for National Affairs, not all immigrants -- and certainly not all of those who came here illegally -- want to become citizens. In 1986, when Congress granted legal status to approximately three million illegal immigrants living in the country at the time, only 41 percent eventually decided to naturalize.

Let's Build on the Paul Filibuster

The Republicans had better not squander the good will Sen. Rand Paul purchased for them in his filibuster over the Obama administration's potential use of armed drones to kill non-enemy combatants in America. I am not simply referring to the constitutional issue of whether the president can engage in such acts, though that's very important. I believe the significance of Paul's filibuster transcends the drone issue. It was about challenging the administration's lawlessness and accountability across the board and his runaway spending and statism. It was about championing freedom, God-given rights and the Constitution. Under questioning, Attorney General Eric Holder has simply refused to give a straight answer about these questions and acts as though the administration has a superior right to hold such matters close to the vest and as though Congress, let alone the American people, doesn't have a say in them or any right even to be apprised.

Why We Give Foreign Aid

WASHINGTON -- Sequestration is not the best time to be doling out foreign aid, surely the most unpopular item in the federal budget. Especially when the recipient is President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt. Morsi is intent on getting the release of Omar Abdel-Rahman (the Blind Sheik), serving a life sentence for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center attack that killed six and wounded more than a thousand. Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood is openly anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and otherwise prolifically intolerant. Just three years ago, Morsi called on Egyptians to nurse their children and grandchildren on hatred for Jews, whom he has called "the descendants of apes and pigs."

Chavismo and Us

*"One of the most important reasons for studying history is that virtually every stupid idea that is in vogue today has been tried before and proved disastrous before, time and again." --Dr. Thomas Sowell* The Berlin Wall was demolished by joyful Europeans throwing off the chains of collectivism nearly a quarter century ago. The Soviet Union, its fraudulent promise of a "workers' paradise" long since proved a bitter delusion, fell soon after. But the idea that government control over the economy can improve the lives of ordinary people, particularly the poor, does not die. Hugo Chavez clawed his way to total power the way other demagogues and thugs -- from Lenin to Peron to Castro to Correa -- have done, by promising to redistribute the nation's wealth (Lenin and Castro also used guns). Like them, Chavez maintained power by crippling the democratic institutions of his nation.

Reign of Evil: A Look Back at the Vicious Rule of Hugo Chavez

A socialist tyrant is dead, but his authoritarianism will tragically live on.

Getting Wise to Government Lies

Take President Obama and his Cabinet of Liars, please. We all know what dirty tricks they played to try and stop the sequester's automatic budget cuts from happening. They spent weeks trying to frighten the America people into believing the country would collapse into chaos and suffering if the federal government's sequester-forced spending cuts went into effect. The campaigner in chief and his chorus of toadies did everything they could to make sure the puny spending cuts -- which would have merely taken the federal budget back to its 2012 level -- would cause the most pain to the most people.

Dennis Rodman Hammered -- Sean Penn, Michael Moore Get a Pass

Former NBA star Dennis Rodman traveled to communist North Korea, a trip financed by a documentary filmmaker. Rodman appeared neither officially nor unofficially as part of the U.S. government. An incredulous George Stephanopoulos of ABC subjected Rodman to a grilling more suitable for a corrupt, double-dealing politician: "When you said you love Kim (Jong Un) and think he's awesome, were you aware of his threats to destroy the United States and his regime's horrendous record on human rights? ... Do you think you have a responsibility to ask him about it so that you don't be perceived as sort of propping up his regime, his cult of personality? ... (He's) a 'great guy' -- who puts 200,000 people in prison camps? ... It sounds like you're apologizing for him. ... Someone who hypothetically is a murderer who is your friend is still a murderer."

The Lie Gets Worse

WASHINGTON -- I do not know about you, but to me this sequestration imbroglio is getting interesting. Last week, I wrote of my surprise that a basic untruth was being repeated over and over again by the White House, to wit, that the Republicans were responsible for the monstrosity of sequestration. I wrote that, as I recalled it, sequestration was an idea introduced by the White House to coax the Republicans and the Democrats into a deal in the summer of 2011 to raise the ceiling on the national debt. Remember that deal? And another thing, there would be no tax increase. President Barack Obama himself endorsed the 2011 idea of sequestration before claiming in his third debate with Mitt Romney that, "The sequester is not something that I proposed." And he went on, "It is something that the Congress proposed." Really?

Sequesterville

The Broadway musical "Annie" is enjoying another revival on Broadway. The show opened during the Carter administration when America was in need of some optimism. "The sun'll come out tomorrow," sang Annie, and with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, for a while, it did. Now we're back in "Hooverville," the name given to shanty towns that popped up during the Great Depression. It isn't that bad yet, though the Obama administration is forecasting gloom and doom if Republicans don't cave on another tax increase.

The California 'Mordida'

California now works on the principle of the mordida, or "bite." Its government assumes that it can take something extra from residents for the privilege of living in their special state. Gov. Jerry Brown made that assumption explicit in his latest back-and-forth with Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who keeps luring Californians to lower-tax, higher-employment Texas. Recently, Brown said of Texas, "Who would want to spend summers there in 110-degree heat inside some kind of fossil fuel air conditioner?" Translated, Brown's retort meant that despite California's sluggish economy, high taxes and poor services, it's still worth staying there to enjoy its beautiful climate -- especially along the 1,000-mile-long coast, where most of the state's elites live comfortably without a need for high-priced air conditioning.

Greatest Generation the Most Entitled